The Space Between Us (2017)

STX Entertainment

The director of Hannah Montana: The Movie and screenwriters with connections to 1990s young adult television series “Charmed” come together to deliver The Space Between Us, one of the most baffling and inane films of recent memory.

The notion that a boy born on Mars, curious about and wanting to visit Earth, is an intriguing premise which, with the right writers and proper handlers, could be really all you need for a compelling movie. However, because we are marketing this movie to teens, we get what essentially plays like a pilot episode of a young adult television series on basic cable. And I don’t think this series would get picked up.

There is a decent enough, if not logically wacky, beginning: an astronaut (Janet Montgomery) discovering she is pregnant, while in flight to Mars, dies on the Red Planet moments after giving birth to a baby boy. When we cut to 16 years later, the baby, now a teenager named Gardner (Asa Butterfield), is surrounded by a bunch of scientists, a robot, and astronaut and mother-like figure Kendra (Carla Gugino), all on a colonized Mars.

The colonization is the brainchild of Nathaniel Sanders (Gary Oldman), a lifelong lover of space who turned his youthful dreams into his life’s work, the billionaire scientist keeping Gardner’s existence a secret from the public the entire time.